in.] THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 235 



nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea to the word, 

 it finds that disorder may indeed be the negation of order, 

 but that this negation is then the implicit affirmation of the 

 presence of the opposite order, which we shut our eyes to 

 because it does not interest us, or which we evade by deny- 

 ing the second order in its turn — that is, at bottom, by 

 re-establishing the first. How can we speak, then, of an 

 incoherent diversity which an understanding organizes? 

 It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this inco- 

 herence to be realized or realizable: when we speak of it, 

 we believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the 

 idea actually present, we find, as we said before, only the 

 disappointment of the mind confronted with an order that 

 does not interest it, or a swaying of the mind between 

 two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple 

 of the empty word that we have created by joining a 

 negative prefix to a word which itself signifies some- 

 thing. But it is this analysis that we neglect to make. 

 We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to us to 

 distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible to one 

 another. 



We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears 

 as contingent. If there are two kinds of order, this con- 

 tingency of order is explained: one of the forms is con- 

 tingent in relation to the other. Where I find the geo- 

 metrical order, the vital was possible; where the order is 

 vital, it might have been geometrical. But suppose that 

 the order is everywhere of the same kind, and simply admits 

 of degrees which go from the geometrical to the vital: 

 if a determinate order still appears to me to be contingent, 

 and can no longer be so by relation to an order of another 

 kind, I shall necessarily believe that the order is contingent 

 by relation to an absence of itself, that is to say by relation 

 to a state of things "in which there is no order at all." 



